All
Eyes on GreenlandGlobal
Warming Continues to Warm the GlobeAlexander
Zaitchik

A
couple of months ago, The Beast suggested that
Anderson Cooper might be due for some new windbreakers.
So, we suggested, might we all. The article was green boilerplate
decrying lazy inaction and willful ignorance on the part
of the public and the media in the face of an obviously,
and possibly catastrophically, changing climate. The column’s
news peg was a study in the journal Nature claiming to confirm
the probable link between rising ocean temperatures and
increased hurricane activity. Two weeks later, Katrina fell
crashing to her knees like some angry Greek goddess of the
sea and sucked the first cock in what turned out to be a
violent late hurricane season orgy of wind and water in
the Gulf.

Within hours Anderson Cooper
was in New Orleans, slogging around in a shiny blue windbreaker.

A
few readers wrote to applaud us for “predicting” Katrina,
but they might as well have congratulated their grandmothers
for winning a dollar at the penny slots during Senior Appreciation
Week at Foxwoods. Any paper publishing regularly about the
menace of climate change during the last 15 years has no
doubt had an article or three appear just before a “100-year
flood” or “the longest drought in living memory” or a “busier
than usual” hurricane season or “unseasonably mild weather”
or a “freak” blizzard. It isn’t hard to predict freak weather
these days. Biblical has been the norm for years.

The roll of extreme weather events
and milestones has become so steady that the BBC last month
gave up mentioning every new weather first; the network
now simply refers people to a website that tracks shattered
local heat and rain records. The list is currently waterlogged
with banner numbers for October 2005, a busy month for climate
change in Britain as well as the Gulf region, where as of
this writing the 23rd tropical storm of the season is headed
for poor little Haiti.

Though the Gulf may have gotten
the most headlines, its problems haven’t been unique this
year. Most of the world is once again reporting historic
news on the climate front. It’s gotten to the point where
a good way to educate the toddler in your life about global
warming would be a game called “Pin the Tail on the Disaster,”
in which the dizzy child stumbles toward a map of the world
and attempts to stick a pin in the enormous bogs recently
created in Northeastern Siberia by the thawing tundra. Wherever
the pin ends up, a lesson on the effects of a warmer climate
results.

Take my current corner of the
world, the southern cone of India. Record rains have paralyzed
transport and destroyed crops throughout the breadbasket
region of Tamil Nadu; even the high-tech capital of Bangalore
is underwater and unplugged. The only reason I’m writing
this where I am, a small town in the mountains of Kerala,
is because it is not safe to leave by bus in any direction.
It’s raining too hard. Meanwhile, in the north of the country,
record post-monsoon rains are destroying crops and sending
the price of onions through the roof, forcing the government
to restrict exports and import from Pakistan in an attempt
to drive prices down. Onions are a very big deal over here.
Delhi alone consumes more than four tons a day, and if there
is anything to guarantee social instability on the subcontinent,
it is a prolonged onion crisis. The wall separating climate
change and social chaos in the coming decades may often
be as tenuous as a staple vegetable.

As in most countries, the Indians
are too consumed with fueling economic growth, quenching
its energy thirst and keeping up with China to dwell on
the probable causes of the rains and the floods. And so
climate-related emergencies are isolated in the media; weaknesses
in government preparedness and response analyzed; end of
story.

But the real story, deserving
as much round the clock coverage as the price of onions
in India or FEMA’s follies in Washington, is the silent
one that never ends. It’s the story of a civilization slitting
its wrists in a steadily warming tub of water. No news-cycle
peg should be needed for this story, though they are never
lacking these days.

The need to treat the larger
climate story with the same sustained attention as relief
and reconstruction efforts was driven home by an October
27 New York Times piece by Andrew Revkin’s, titled “No Escape:
Thaw Gains Momentum.”

An all too rare example of an
in-depth global warming story, the article was loosely pegged
to the fact that in September, the area covered by sea ice
in the Arctic region reached a record low. The congealing
consensus among Arctic watchers, reports Revkin, is that
the north polar climate flywheel is in motion, and it is
all but certain that the region’s summer ice cover will
disappear completely by the end of the century, possibly
as soon as 2050. This is very bad not just because it will
mean to a bunch of drowned Eskimos and Polar Bears, but
because a lot of heat normally bounced back into space will
be absorbed by the sea, thus fueling the warming loop.

As bad as Arctic melting would
be, it’s nothing compared to the big momma of ice cap fears:
The dreaded Greenland Thaw. Eric the Red no doubt fantasized
about such a melt while trying to colonize the place with
dubious Vikings, but for me Revkin’s description of the
Greenland cap was the scariest thing on offer this Halloween:
“Rising two miles high and spreading over an area twice
the size of California, this vast reservoir – essentially
the Gulf of Mexico frozen and flipped onto land – contains
enough water to raise sea levels worldwide more than 20
feet.”

I don’t have my handy sea-level
calculator in front of me, but I believe that would make
the New York Stock Exchange a very big turtle tank.

It’s
getting harder to find scientists who still declare that
political action can stave off the worst endgame of a process
already in motion, but Revkin quotes David Barber, an Arctic
expert at the University of Manitoba who stoically holds
that steep emissions cuts are still worth pursuing, even
as the trend lines surge in the wrong direction: “I wish
we would have started 50 years ago,” said Barber, “but to
not start now would be a real tragedy.”

Amen. I propose we begin our
renewed efforts by naming all future hurricanes after foot-dragging
fossil-fuel industry executives, their largest investors
and their political allies. Because even now, there’s no
telling how many Americans still think all these storms
are acts of god, and god alone.